A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  She’d heard the scientists’ conjectures about Camp Century being a missile launching site, but frankly, she thought the idea was just a bit too absurd, even for the government. How could you contain a thing like that? You couldn’t. It was more likely that Bader was fanning the flames of that rumor to scare her into submission. Submission to what, though?

  “You know this for a fact?” she asked.

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Would you get to your point?” She found that she was shaking.

  He nodded and held eye contact. “I believe in knowledge. Science is mankind’s only hope. I need to keep the government not just interested in the ice cores but committed to them. I like to think of our work as a distraction. Maybe we don’t need to launch any missiles if we have instead earth’s history, and future, in our sites. Are you following me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I need flawless performance coming from every single team member at SIPRE.”

  “Is there a problem with my work?”

  “Our bosses aren’t going to tolerate a single slip. Or more to the point, even the perception of a slip. The threat of a slip.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “It doesn’t look good. You gotta play the game. You gotta try harder.”

  “Have there been errors in my work? Have you gotten complaints?”

  The waiter put a plate of sole wrapped around crab, garnished with a half dozen bright green beans, in front of each of them. He backed away from their table, bowing. Bader dug in as if he’d forgotten they were in the middle of a conversation. He polished off the sole in about thirty seconds.

  Lucybelle looked around the dining room and tried to gather her wits. The black, white, and sapphire color scheme didn’t help. It was both too rich and too harsh at the same time. She kept feeling as if she were about to slip off her chair, the polished cotton of her dress not adhering to the blue-striped silk upholstery. The blue camellias on the china, together with the hydrangeas covering her body, made her wish for garden shears. It was much too floral. The dining room’s opulence was meant to soothe, but it only made her edgy. “Would you be so kind as to tell me what you’re talking about?”

  “I think you know. It wouldn’t be helpful for me to spell it out.”

  She pushed her plate toward him. “Go ahead. I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “Don’t be that way. You’re a ballsy girl. You can buck this. You just have to be more savvy.”

  “So what do you think you have on me?”

  “Don’t smirk at me. You’re too smart to pretend that you don’t understand what’s at stake.”

  “I know all about Beverly and the State Department.”

  He waved away the admission. “That was just silly. State Department nonsense.”

  Silly? Nonsense? Families had been severed. Homes had been lost. Beverly’s friend Jane hung herself.

  “Sure,” he said. “You could lose your job. But jobs are the least of it.”

  “So what’s the most of it?”

  “What’s at stake,” he said, “are the ice cores.”

  He finished off his wine, mopped a piece of bread across the plate’s pale blue camellias, wiped his mouth, and exchanged his plate for Lucybelle’s. “You really don’t want your fish? I’ve had better. It’s a bit swampy. Maybe it’s the crab. The sauce too is so-so. It’s almost coagulated. The best fish I’ve ever had was in Chile. You sit on the edge of a fjord, at little tables on perfectly swept cement slabs, covered with beautiful Moroccan rugs, and you watch the guy with a homemade fishing pole and line, just a few yards away, haul in your dinner. Patagonian hake. He walks it up the beach and hands it to your waiter. It all takes about half an hour, from fjord to plate. By the way, Chilean wine is also excellent.”

  “What about the ice cores?” Lucybelle asked.

  “The best part about Camp Century is that our labs will be right there, on site, and we’ll have state-of-the-art everything. I’m not willing to let anything compromise our progress. It’s been too damn slow as it is. If some silly socializing choice affects my ability to keep going, my ability to keep our sponsors’ eyes trained on knowledge rather than war, well, that’s unforgiveable.”

  Lucybelle laughed out loud. “My attendance at a party could alter the future of mankind.”

  Bader grinned. But after the waiter cleared away the dinner plates, he leaned forward and said, “Seriously. It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Your attendance at a party could alter the future of mankind. The future of the planet, even.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It’s insanely ridiculous. I’ll grant you that. And yet, I have my life-work to protect. So tell me. Where’ve you been?”

  “You know where I’ve been. I’m in the lab more hours than is humanly acceptable.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Did you purposely hire us, all of us: me, Beverly, Ruthie”—she didn’t have evidence that anyone knew about Dorothy, so she left her name off the list—“so you could blackmail us if necessary?”

  Bader’s wineglass stopped halfway to his mouth and he looked truly stunned. Then he burst out with a loud guffaw. “Good idea. I think I’ll keep that in mind for future hiring. But actually, sugar, the argument usually goes the other direction. We can’t trust homos because they can be pressured so easily by the enemy. Anyway, you three are women, for god’s sake. No one . . .”

  There was some satisfaction in seeing him stall himself out.

  “Cares?” Lucybelle offered. “Now you’re contradicting yourself. What women do doesn’t matter, so my socializing choices, as you call them, shouldn’t matter. To you or anyone else.”

  Bader sighed dramatically. “Right. Of course. They shouldn’t. But look. There’s a big difference between you and the girls in the foyer. They’re not privy to classified material. I really don’t care what they do and where they go. They’re expendable. You’re not. I hired you because of your reputation for excellent scientific editorial work. Period.”

  Lucybelle hated the tears that came into her eyes, but she prized having Bader’s respect. “So then why are you threatening me now?”

  “I’m not threatening you. They are. In any case, I can’t have it. I just don’t have time.”

  “They?”

  “Come on. Surely you know how this works. I got a letter. Never heard of the guy who signed it, but he’s official, that much is clear.”

  A letter.

  She felt transported back to her sunshine pen, lying naked, the crude wooden structure maybe protecting her and maybe caging her, overhead the pale sky, hot with circling crows. Where is the place where shame morphs into anger?

  A letter meant an informant.

  “Don’t give me that hot look of yours,” Bader said. “You’re in no position to get huffy.”

  “No one can blackmail me if I’m not afraid of exposure.”

  Bader sat back in his chair with a slow smile of surprise. “True enough. They can’t.” He waited a few beats, watching her closely, letting her think about what she was saying. Because, after all, he had his own interests to protect. Quietly, he said, “No, you don’t care about any of that . . . exposure.”

  Lucybelle pictured her mother’s thin-lipped expression of distaste; her daddy’s overhanging eyebrows and gleam of pride; the little blue house on the shady street, the interior draped with homemade quilts and the exterior dwarfed by the giant oak tree; the front steps of the First Methodist Church of Pocahontas, where big ladies with big hats clasped their hands on her cheeks; the face of her best childhood friend, whom she hadn’t seen in two decades, a girl whose character she suddenly realized was echoed by Dorothy’s.

  She looked down at the blank white tablecloth. She had no way forward.

  “I thought so,” Bader said. “You don’t want to do that.”

  Lucybelle straightened her posture, leveled her gaze at Bader, and tried to calm the scrabbling.

  To hi
s credit, Bader looked uncomfortable. Yet he persevered. “I know you care about our work too.”

  “I work myself to the bone for you. I thought you’d invited me to dinner to offer me a raise.”

  He nodded slowly and she saw the affection in his eyes. He’d invited her to dinner at the Camellia House in the Drake Hotel because he wanted to compensate for his unsavory message. He knew he had no right.

  “I’ll cut you a deal,” he said.

  “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  “You’re right. You deserve a fat raise. In exchange for—”

  “How about in exchange for the work I do. Isn’t that why I’m paid?”

  “No more deviant parties.” His eyes lit with an imagined view of that party.

  “Who ratted me out? I want a name.”

  “I told you. I got a letter. Never heard of the fellow. FBI, though. You should feel honored.”

  “What I feel is paranoid.”

  “Well, you should. That’s appropriate. You need to keep your hands clean. Eyes on the prize.”

  Lucybelle laughed even though it wasn’t funny, not even a little bit. She couldn’t believe she was having this conversation.

  “Bottom line: I need you. And I don’t need any goons breathing down my neck about you.” He sighed and signaled the waiter, from whom he ordered coffee for both of them, a slice of chocolate cake, and a French custard. “Look. I wasn’t going to go into detail. But I didn’t expect this, shall we say, resistance from you.” He held up a restraining hand. “Hear me out. I like your easily triggered indignation. You have a sense of fairness you don’t find all that often in Americans. It reaches far in my view. I’d do anything for you. I would. Short of spoiling—”

  “Your ice cores.”

  “Exactly. So I’m going to lay it out even more clearly. You were at a party for some Negro playwright, a woman named Lorraine Hansberry. You apparently arrived with an author who goes by Valerie Taylor. Am I right so far?”

  “This was all in the letter from the spook?”

  “Taylor is a member of the American Socialist Party. In Europe, no one would give a rip. You know it’s a bit different here. They take great offense when citizens who have access to highly classified information socialize with commies.”

  “You said she’s a socialist.”

  “Believe me, they don’t differentiate. Adding insult to injury, your date—”

  “She wasn’t my date.”

  “Really? I heard differently. Taylor is also a member of some new organization out in Los Angeles called Daughters of Belugas, or something like that.”

  “Belugas are whales, Henri.”

  “So then what is the name of the organization?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” she said looking him right in the eye.

  “Good girl.”

  “You know, you’re one to talk.” She took a sip of her black coffee. “You with that floozy Adele in your apartment last month.”

  The expression on his face surprised her. Since when did Bader ever take offense? She was pleased to have scored a point. He stirred four sugars into his coffee, added cream, but didn’t pick up the cup. “That floozy,” he said, “is my wife.”

  “What?”

  “Adele.”

  “You’re married?”

  He nodded slowly.

  She could have asked all kinds of questions, like how come he never talked about her, and did she really stay with her mother when he was in Greenland or the Antarctic, but none of it was her business, any more than her intimate life was his. She decided to end the evening on the proper playing field. “So. How much of a raise do I get?”

  “We’re in agreement then? We see eye to eye? I can count on you?” He rarely allowed vulnerability to show. She knew how much he cared about the ice work and she’d seen just now that he loved his wife. Even Henri Bader could be hurt.

  “Yes,” she said. “You can count on me.”

  “I’ll increase you by twenty percent.” He pulled out his wallet and counted out the dinner cash.

  “Thirty percent.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  She didn’t get up from the table as he did. The truth was, renewing this agreement with Henri Bader felt good. She had not and would not “act on” her feelings, as he’d put it in the Harlem diner. Fine. The options presented so far hadn’t been exactly irresistible. All those dates set up by her lab friends had felt like job interviews at best. Stella had Wanda, which explained why she hadn’t called her after the baseball game. Then there was Dorothy, who Lucybelle needed too much as a friend. Finally, most recently, there’d been the socialist sapphist Valerie Taylor, for whom she didn’t feel an iota of attraction.

  “Are we agreed?” she asked.

  “I’ll find the money. Thirty percent.”

  As usual, Bader didn’t even say good-bye. He left her alone at the dining room table, looking every bit the part of a jilted lover. The other women in the room gave her sympathetic half-smiles as she rose from her seat, with the help of the now solicitous waiter, and walked out of the dining room.

  Dinner had lasted just over an hour. She’d had too much to drink, and not enough to eat, but that wasn’t why her hands shook. Lucybelle Bledsoe, farm girl from Pocahontas, Arkansas, with an FBI file? She didn’t know whether she was about to disassemble due to hilarity or terror. She wanted another martini. She looked in the Coq d’Or, but the cave-like atmosphere was intimidating, a movie-set den of spies, so she walked the hallways of the hotel’s ground floor until she found a placed called the Cape Cod Room. It was perfect: small and cozy, a red check motif throughout, and a giant crab mounted on the wall.

  As she took a seat at the worn wooden bar, a man slid down from the end to sit on the stool next to her. “May I join you?”

  What did it matter? The rules were utterly twisted. She was pretty sure, however, that talking to strange men in public places was approved behavior. He made a big show of lighting her cigarette, extinguishing the match with a big flourish.

  “What’ll you have?”

  “Dry martini, please, up with an olive.”

  “Two,” he told the bartender holding up two fingers. He looked like a salesman with his mussed hair and ill-fitting suit, sad eyes and sadder mouth, downturned at the corners as if he were perennially on the verge of tears. “I like it here,” he said. “I’m in Chicago a lot, and this is my favorite haunt. The food is good and even when the place is empty, you got company.” He wiped a hand across the wooden bar top into which hundreds of people had carved their initials. “Famous people too. Look.” He leaned across Lucybelle, falling too much against her breasts, and tapped a place on the left end of the bar. “These were carved in 1954. J. D. and M. M. Those initials mean anything to you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Bingo. Right here, same as you and me.”

  Then, sugar, I don’t care if you want to dance naked with Marilyn Monroe. Capiche?

  “Sure, if you say so. You can call me Marilyn and I’ll call you Joe.”

  This unduly pleased the fellow, as if it were the first yes he’d heard in months. “You’re on, Marilyn!” He downed his drink, motioned for another, and then threw himself into a river of words. The monologist began with a description of his unhappy marriage, moved on to the woes of being financially responsible for his institutionalized mentally retarded sister, the week’s string of unsuccessful sales calls, the fleabag hotels where he sleeps, and the elegant ones where he drinks.

  Normally Lucybelle wouldn’t suffer a fool like this for a second, but tonight she sipped her drink and took refuge in the boredom of his soliloquy, wanting the dull patter to muffle her disturbing thoughts. They broke free anyway, her thoughts, flew overhead like a flock of anxious birds, darting here and there, checking the ceiling and corners for danger. Was anyone in the restaurant watching her? This drunk man talking to her, was he a mole? How she’d hated the insidious way paranoia oo
zed into every crevice of her friends’ lives, and now the cold sweat was on her own skin.

  “You seem like a nice lady,” the man said. “I wouldn’t want to insult you. But maybe. I mean, if you wanted. My hotel is a few blocks away, but . . .”

  Lucybelle slid off the barstool and put a hand on his shoulder. His face brightened and it reminded her of Dorothy. She removed her hand. How does one say, yes, I understand loneliness, and yet you aren’t the one to relieve mine?

  “You haven’t insulted me. Thank you for the drink. Good night.”

  Friday, June 27, 1958

  Lucybelle was running so late she considered just taking L’Forte into work with her. She could walk him in Wilmette. Besides, it was promising to be a hot day and she hated leaving the poor little fellow cooped up. This weekend they could take long walks by the lake.

  She gathered the dachshund under her arm, still unsure whether she was going to carry him with her to the train station or take him back upstairs after he did his business, and hurried down the stairwell and out to the street. The chrome fender of the taxicab glinted in the already hot sun. Stella stood against a tree in the shade, hands in her pockets. She waited for Lucybelle’s eyes to find her before pushing off from the tree trunk and approaching.

  “What are you doing here?” She set down L’Forte and he ran to Stella, jumping up on her thighs as if they were long lost friends.

  “I came to apologize.” She scratched the short fur on the top of L’Forte’s bony head. “He’s forgiven me, anyway.”

  “I have to get to work.”

  “Why not take the day off ? The Sox are playing the Washington Senators. It’s going to be a good game.”

  “You think this is funny?”

  “Nothing funny about baseball.”

  Lucybelle willed her feet to walk away, but they didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry. I should have called. I should have explained. I was confused. Whatever happened between us just happened. Then I didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. I guess I figured staying away would be the best thing.”

  At least Lucybelle hadn’t imagined that something had happened between them. “So then why are you here now?”